1. The last (and only?) of the American Burkean conservatives offers his paean to the waning WASP aristocracy that (apparently) served us all so well.. nyti.ms/2DZufmq
2. Here's the tl;dr version of Douthat's piece...in Burke's words from 1790. "The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever...." [cont'd]
3. "Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!"
4. Douthat thinks part of the problem is that the old elite's exchanged its traditional faith for a modern pantheism. Interestingly, that's exactly what Buckley complained about in his canonical book God and Man at Yale...PUBLISHED IN 1951. 
5. "We've always been at war with Eastasia. The elite has always been crumbling and Humpty Dumpty will never be put back together again. The damn kids these days. People don't write letters like they used to. Sure, Kipling was a racist imperialist, but at least he wrote poetry!"
6. I've long thought conservatives were people more likely to have a richer grasp of history (because, you know, conservative means wanting to preserve things from the past). I now think the opposite might actually be true.
7. Perhaps the preservationist impulses of American conservatives like Douthat have never succeeded because the past they seek to conserve never existed as they imagine it...we can't conserve something we never had.
8. This might be a good time to recall the lesson of David Halberstam’s great book on Vietnam. It was “The Best and the Brightest,” the great WASP elite from Harvard and Yale, that bungled us into Vietnam.
